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Tracking Work Requests

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Once you've scheduled and assigned work requests, tracking progress is fairly straightforward.

For smaller work requests and for smaller projects, I typically only note whether each work request is still in progress or if it was finished. For larger work requests and for larger projects, I typically track how many hours it took to finish each work request. This helps me balance workloads during each work iteration and better plan for later work iterations. I try to enter hours spent working every day; if I wait too long, I simply can't remember how much time was spent on each work request.

For larger projects I sometimes use finer-grained statuses. Some of these statuses include "Not Started," "Active," "Cut," "On Hold," "Waiting For," "Blocked," "Researching," "Waiting for Review," and so on. The drawback of this is when you have lots of work requests, it can be tough to tell at a quick glance how many work requests are in progress versus on hold versus done. For smaller projects, I just use "Active," "On Hold," and "Done."

For projects with multiple team members, I try to spend a few minutes every day checking our progress. I look for things like work requests that haven't had any hours spent logged against them for a while, on-hold work requests that have stayed that way for a while or that don't have any reasons why they're on hold, team members who don't appear to be entering their hours spent or updating their assigned work requests' statuses for several days in a row, and new work requests that may have been added during the work iteration without prior approval. Once a week, I try to gather the team together to review our progress as well. I also try to meet once a week with the project's chief decision-maker or sponsor to review progress with him or her.

There are several great Microsoft tools for tracking progress. Some of the most popular are Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Excel. Most times the tool is decided upon by the project's chief decision-maker or sponsor. For smaller projects I typically use Excel. For medium-size projects I typically use SharePoint. For larger projects I typically use Visual Studio Team System.

If there are other posts along these lines that you'd like to see, please let me know in this post's comments.

In my next series of posts, I will tackle the subject of e-mail efficiency.

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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